Page 47 of The Starfish Sisters

He gives me a quizzical look. “LikeThe King and I?”

“Yep.” I touch my girl’s head. “This is Jasmine.”

“LikeAladdin,” she pipes up.

It makes him laugh. “Smart, too, I think. She’s inside.”

Maui bounds up the steps, Jasmine right behind him with the cat carrier in hand, leaning sideways to balance the weight of it.

“How are you, Phoebe?” Joel opens a toolbox on the side of the truck and reaches inside. “I see the flower farm every morning on my way down the mountain. It’s a splendor.”

“A splendor,” I repeat, smiling. “You always had the most surprising vocabulary for a guy.”

“Yeah?” He glances at me over his shoulder, and I remember how bad my crush was, a living thing that was born of a single week of kisses followed by nothing at all. “Thanks,” he says as he straightens. He’s gathered a handful of bits and pieces. Waits for me, and we walk up the steps. “You were the only person I ever met who read more than I did.”

“Suze was pretty close.”

“Nah. You always outread us both.” He gestures, and I step inside ahead of him. Maui bounds toward me, slurps my hand, runs back toward the kitchen, his nails clattering on the floor. I’m here all the time in my capacity as caretaker, for which Suze pays me too much money. I’ve repeatedly told her I’d do it for free, for the love of the place, but she continues to deposit a ridiculous sum in my account every month.

The thing is, I do love the pleasure of the quiet rooms when I’m here by myself, disturbed by nothing but my ghostly presence. I love the space and have since I climbed in a window when I was ten and found the abandoned rooms still perfectly furnished, as if someone ran away in the middle of the night. The truth was much sadder—an old man died here and had no heirs, so the place fell into probate and was somehow forgotten.

Filled now with animals and a little girl and Suze and Joel, it’s an entirely different place. The kettle has made the window behind itsteamy. A seagull is sitting on the railing outside. Jasmine and Maui have landed in the living room, near the bookcases, and Joel walks toward the back of the kitchen. “Don’t turn anything on,” Suze says, poking her head into the living room from the kitchen. “The electricity is off.”

“Okay.”

Suze stands by the counter, one foot over the other—it’s a tic we both have, one among many. In the soft, stormy light, she looks haggard. Older than I could ever have imagined back in the day.

As if to mock us, behind her on the shelf is a photo of the two of us when we were three weeks past our twenty-first birthdays, at the premiere ofA Woman for the Ages.

She invited Amma, too, but Amma didn’t want to bother with all the folderol and dressing up. I was a nervous wreck on the inside, but my entire job for the night was to be support for Suze, who pretended she wasn’t nervous, but I knew she was by the torn thumbnail on her left hand, which a nail tech fixed with some glue and fresh polish and then painted with a bitter something to keep her from doing it again.

We got ready at her new house in Bel Air. It wasn’t huge, only three bedrooms, but it boasted a courtyard with a swimming pool under palm trees, floor-to-ceiling windows in all the interior rooms, and an elegance of line my years of architecture drooling could appreciate. “Did you ever think you’d really have a house like this?” I asked the day I arrived.

She snorted. “No way! I’m still pinching myself. Beryl told me to buy real estate, so I did.” She squeezed my hand. “A swimming pool! Just like yours.”

“It’s gorgeous,” I said, squeezing back.

By the time the makeup people and stylists were finished with us, we both looked fantastic. I was at my slimmest, thanks to an art school schedule that left little time to eat, and lots of sweaty, hot sex with Derek. They dressed me in a shimmery sheath that displayed a lot of cleavage, and swept my hair into an updo, and made up my face so thatI looked like a model. I barely recognized myself and couldn’t wait for the photos.

But Suze. “Oh my God,” I breathed when she came out. Tears sprang to my eyes. “Suze!”

The gown was a tip of the hat to a flapper dress in a shade of aquamarine that matched her eyes exactly. It was beaded over net, barely there over the shoulders with a plunging back. The iridescence caught her curves and displayed her slenderness. Her hair was simply caught back in a sort of french twist that made her look glamourous, and her face was all eyes and lips. “Good, right?” she said with a crooked smile. “Properly Cinderella.”

“I’m so proud of you.”

She hugged me. Our sequins and slipperiness made a swishing sound. The stylist shrieked. “Your makeup!”

Suze whispered, “Thank you for being here to share this.”

It was a dazzling night. The press went wild for her. At the parties, everyone crowded in to talk to her, and she managed it all as if she’d been in the business for decades. She was confident and smiled easily but not too much, and listened carefully when people asked questions, then answered exactly right, every time. I’d always known she could act, but this was a whole extra talent.

Or maybe it was all the same. Maybe she was acting now, acting the part of a successful actress.

Which she was, overnight. By morning, the reviews were pouring in, and the critics adored her. By the end of two months, the movie had outearned all its competitors and was on track to being one of the highest-grossing films in history. By the end of the year, Suze had made another movie and signed to do two more. Her life grew so hectic that I wasn’t able to see her very often, and I understood.

In the photo on the shelf behind exhausted modern-day Suze, a match to one on my bedroom bureau, we are both young and beautiful, on the brink of the next chapter of our lives. Our hands are clutchedso tightly you can see the white on Suze’s knuckles, and our bodies are very close together.

The woman before me in her kitchen is world weary and vulnerable. I haven’t seen her this way since we were teenagers. I think of her lying in the hospital bed after her father beat her so badly for being pregnant, utterly still, attached to all the wires and tubes. I think of the second hospital bed, after another beating, and my stomach squeezes hard.